Residential gateways are widely used to connect devices in a home of a customer to the Internet or to any other wide area network (WAN). Residential gateways use for example digital subscriber line (DSL) technology that enables a high data rate transmission over copper lines, or use optical fiber broadband transmission systems, e.g. fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) or fiber-to-the premises (FTTP).
Home networks have become part of everyday life for many customers. A home network consists of a range of heterogeneous devices, which means that the home network is made up of different kinds of devices. All these devices need to communicate with each other. For this interconnection, multiple solutions are available: The home network uses a mixture of solutions, such as wireless and wired network connections. Combining these devices creates a network that allows users to share information and control devices in the home. Examples of networked devices in the home are for example residential gateways, set-top boxes, TVs, personal computers, tablet PCs, smart phones, network-attached storage (NAS) devices, printers and game consoles.
DDS (Data Distribution Service for Real-Time Systems) is a standard governed by the Object Management Group (OMG). It describes a data-centric publish-subscribe middleware that can be used to build distributed real-time systems. Since its formal adoption as an OMG standard in the year 2004 it has become a popular technology used in many different industries such as the airline/aviation industry, the automotive industry, the military . . . . Several commercial and open-source implementations of the DDS standard exist.
Known signalling systems for setting up media sessions in an Internet Protocol (IP) environment are SIP, H.323, MGCP, Megaco, etc. These systems have the following characteristics:                They are using action based messages.        They are working on functions (protocol entities), that change (session) state based on the requested actions.        The control communication for setting up sessions is between dedicated entities, preconfigured or not.        A signalling control communication for setting up sessions ripples through multiple entities in the network.        
In software architecture, Publish/Subscribe is a messaging pattern where senders of messages, called publishers, do not program the messages to be sent directly to specific receivers, called subscribers. Instead, published data is multicasted, without knowledge of what, if any, subscribers there may be. Similarly, subscribers subscribe to particular data, and only receive messages that are of interest, without knowledge of what, if any, publishers there are. Entities connected to a Publish/Subscribe-based network communicate on ‘Topics’ and value changes of its parameters that are published, to the ones subscribed.
In a Publish/Subscribe environment, the message approach, where a message is sent between dedicated entities is therefore no longer applicable:                Publish/Subscribe uses information exchange, rather than actions, on a Publish/Subscribe basis, an on a ‘Topic’ basis. The Topic has a name, and contains some parameters, which can take specific values.        If an entity wants to receive some information, it needs to subscribe to a topic representing the information, on a filtering basis (topics, parameters, values).        “Publish” means that topic changes, including parameters, are sent around, in principle to any entity that is listening; this can include multiple entities, not only just one.        An entity should only be listening when it has ‘subscribed’ to a topic, and when an imposed filter allows the listening.        
So Publish/Subscribe is data-object (Topic) based instead of message based. The paradigm is different from message based:                In ‘message-based’, action messages are triggering a status change in an entity.        In ‘Data-based’ (e.g. DDS), entities signal the session state and properties to other subscribed entities, which will cause such entity to act, and publish, also an updated session state, and properties, again to subscribed entities.        
The Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP) is a link layer protocol in the Internet Protocol Suite used by network devices for advertising their identity and capabilities. Media Endpoint Discovery is an enhancement of LLDP, known as LLDP-MED, that provides an auto-discovery of LAN policies for enabling plug and play networking, device and media endpoint location discovery, and inventory management.